Andy Jassy, CEO of the Amazon Web Services unit, unveiled the new products last week at the company's fifth annual re:Invent conference, which drew 32,000 people from diverse industries to Las Vegas. He pitched Amazon's wide breadth of services and ability to customize them for clients, while poking fun at competitor Oracle Corp., which Amazon dismisses as a cloud pretender.

The event attracted people from financial services, healthcare, gaming and other industries interested in learning more about how to use cloud computing, and let Amazon flex its muscles as a market leader in the fast-growing industry. Public cloud spending is expected to increase almost 17 percent to $204bn this year, according to researcher Gartner Inc.

Amazon is trying to maintain its lead over Microsoft Corp., Alphabet Inc.'s Google, IBM and Oracle as more companies transition from using their servers to renting computing power and data space hosted remotely, which they access via the internet. Movie-service Netflix Inc. is a prominent example of a web company powered by Amazon Web Services. Capital One Financial Corp. announced last week it would transition more of its data to Amazon, highlighting growing interest of the financial sector in the speed and flexibility of cloud computing.

The feud between Amazon and Oracle heated up in September when Oracle chairman Larry Ellison introduced new cloud products during his company's OpenWorld keynote address and said, "Amazon's lead is over."

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